Project Background

Project Abstract

This project assembles a diverse team including ethnographers, a network modeller, and an experimentalist to undertake a cross-cultural study of the micro-dynamics of social inequality. We will examine how people’s identities and social position influence how they are perceived by others, and so how they consequently choose to act in the world. Working in three communities in South Asia and yet more across the globe, we will use a novel combination of ethnographic, experimental, and network methods to see if, and if so how, these dynamics result in a “reputational poverty trap” that reinforces social and economic inequality.

This project grows out of Dr. Power’s earlier fieldwork and research in Tamil Nadu. In an earlier paper “When Does Reputation Lie: Dynamic Feedbacks Between Costly Signals, Social Capital and Social Prominence” written with colleagues Marion Dumas and Jessie Barker, she presented the idea of a “reputational poverty trap,” drawing on some ethnographic illustration and then formalising this with analytic and agent-based models.

The aim of Rep²SI is to explore these dynamics further, taking a comparative and mixed-methods approach. We will focus primarily on South Asia, but also look to other communities around the world to see how these dynamics vary in different sociocultural settings. We plan to collaborate with members of the ENDOW project, a US NSF-funded project that has a large team of anthropologists gathering demographic, economic, and social network data in communities around the world.

You can read the original project proposal below: